Endoscope systems are used to inspect cavities in the industrial and medical sector that are difficult to access. The restricted image field of endoscope systems makes the orientation and the coordination more difficult when inspecting the cavities, so the entire inspection process becomes significantly more complex and time-consuming. In order to extend the viewing field of endoscope systems, methods have been developed which produce a total image from a sequence of endoscopically recorded, individual digital images. The joining is also called stitching or mosaicing. The viewing field of the endoscope system is artificially extended by the joined total image, which is also called an image mosaic.
A real time-capable method for joining endoscopically recorded individual images to form an image mosaic, which is based on a calculation of the optical flow, is known from the specialist article “Real-Time Image Mosaic for Endoscopic Video Sequences” by Konen et al., published in “Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin”, 2007. A vector field is called an optical flow and gives the movement direction and speed between two respective individual images for each pixel. It is assumed here that the pixel values between the individual images do not change, but merely displace. The drawback in this method is that calculation of the optical flow is laborious.